Patrick White

Wilder Times Than We Thought They Were In The Moment

Wilder times than we thought they were in the moment, savage intensities cultivated in the name of art, the children of the bourgeois afraid of violating the mystique of genius as if there were a lumpen proletariat taboolike a magic circle drawn around it, cordons of spinal cords at a premier of the polymorphous perversemelting down like emotional nuclear reactors irradiating Pleiadic insights of white phosphoruslike jelly fish trying to plug into the scene.

First magnitude stars that weren’t quite sure whose legend they were shining in as long as there were something Icarian about it and infallibly tragic, as if to be destroyed by your gift were certain proof you were a snakecharmer with a talent dark enough to curse your own blessing in the sacro-sanct way sacrificial heroism is a judas-goat for the gods to coax them out of hiding.

What addictions, what madness didn’t we tolerate? No weirdness, no twisted perversity of fate unacceptable in order to keep up the morale among ourselves that our own derangements were liveable humans. Stoic sobriety with a touch of the infernally noble as long as there were enough star power to be derived from it extemporally to fool yourself you’d been to hell, you’d conversed with the gibbering ghosts in the underworld, and now you were ascending from Hades, empty-handed, except for an abalone inlaid guitar, a voice, a repertoire of songs you used to sing from coast to coast like a ghost at your own seance, or if you were a poet, three books under your boa skin beltlike wampum, a wounded heart channeling Horatian odes to staunch the bloodflow like a hemorrhage of fire.

We lived as if we were always spitting into the face of librarians moved by poetry enough to write about making raspberry jam in their amazingly savoury kitchensand that wasn’t very right or nice of us, regardless of whether they deserved it or not, but it would be less than frank not to admit how alarming it would be not to be able to muster a cobra of spit the same way nowto punish the eyes of the snake-oil salesmen with a taste of their own medicine for fouling the housewells of the muses with all that bleach and brinethey scour their poems with as if they were keel-hauling them on the hull of the moon out of fear of drinking from the same skull cup as everyone else on the nightshift deep in the mines of their starmud working with a candle and canary to bring the occasional jewel to light, out of fear of getting some life under their fingernailsor contaminating their lips with human elixirs.

At least we killed like tigers, not tapeworms, though needless to say, because that’s the way the world is, we did more damage to ourselves trying to stand out like someone real from the mob of the middling and maudlinto suffer the black farce of our former radiance lightyears later in this ventriloquial dawn where wooden dummies have mastered the art of throwing their heartwood around like the voicesof decoy waterbirds in front of a hunter’s blind trying to bring the words of those who can fly down to their level of poultry and pettiness.

Every quarter asked, every quarter given, a disastrous expression of compassion, but when you’re trying to live with largesseas if you had a soul that was more mammal than reptile of course you’re going to err on the side of generosity, your winged horse spurred on by pussywillows and burrs until you’re thrown off by a star under your saddle, the dupe of your own unaccountable gestureas you ride off into the sunset with Don Quixote feeling like Sancho Panza tilting at the futility of counter clockwise windmills on lifelight savings time.

Too many swine. Too few pearls unwilling to be trampled like the grapes of wrath getting indignantly drunk on us. Don’t offer your tears and sacred oils to someone with a drinking problem. Though I encourage you to ignore my advice so you can be what I mean for yourself. Incandescent ingratitude. As if genius took its tragic lifemask off, stepped out of its skin, tore the curtains off the windows like the northern lights and showed you the blackhole of the ego in the spider web that spun a myth of origin like a starmap that knew only a few chords and barred its Fs as an excuse for musicthat maintained the world began with an arachnid but kept that fact hid from the frenzy of friends around the streetlamp of a public image on the radio.

Ego. That paper dragon that likes to play with matches creatively, a brush dipped in paint, a nib in blood that flared up like a bouquet of sulphurous little chapbooks straining to convince you their personality is black magic once you get past the alibi of words that smack of saccharine and formic acid, ants and stinging nettles, and taste how shallow and unclever a cynical lack of sensitivity to things ego doesn’t understand is, to that mess of neurotic avarice that sticks like gum that’s lost its flavour in the tresses of a flypaper museas it lackadaisically strums the guitar like a Ferrari warming up, to disguise the fact, if you go by the work, it can’t really play and the wheel hasn’t been invented for it yet.

Dramatic brawls at midnight, out on the street, at the top of our lungs, embodiments of nemetic karma defending principles willing to settle the score here and now if you were crazy, drunk, or daring enough to risk losing more than you ever had or intended to giveto substantiate your reality with fists that would later bloom like bruised crocuses and waterlilies lyrically inclined to deadly nightshade and moody orchids in an eclipse. But most edged the Texas toe of their cowboy boot up to an unseen line drawn in the stars like a Tropic of Capricorn, that said for all your talk of figs and horns, a coward goes this far and no further for self-preservative reasons that have been canning him like jam since childhood.

More than one night I lay in the dark sobering up, proofreading my name in the sooty contrails of bic lighters on the ceilings of Ottawa city jails, Orphically exalted to have left my mark in an underworld anthology that didn’t depend on a political jury of friends who elected things into print as if they were pensioning off candidates for the senate with two free copies, fifteen minutes max at a mass reading, a minute on the local news and enough notoriety to incrementally cona few more false friends they might have been wrong about you, and accordingly adjust their parallactic affiliation with your twinkling.

My elders, the ghosts of older owls, the afterlives of stars that had burnt out romantically on alcohol, who spoke like legends of themselves in a refugee camp for broken chandeliers and abused constellations performing off Broadway like the loveletters of a mailman who delivered them like the wind in a tree in the autumn, since imprinted like the cambium of last year’s spring in the hall of famous tree rings that have stopped growing. Honoured with urns. But for awhile, precociously, peers of mine, fish dying of thirst beside a freshwater lake, artificial respirators crying out for back-up parachutes because they thought it was poetically cuteto always be the one who was rescued from themselves.

Ego grease. Black farce of a circus on tour with drugstore carnies, clutching at straws like the rungs of a trapeze someone was always falling from like a star you caught and put in your pocket like a safety net that counted on your friends’ sense of timing to save you from your own web like the spindle you made of fate. Metamorphic larvae in the coffins and cocoons, the lifeboats and chrysales these shepherd moons moved into as if they were on a grand tour of the zodiac. Pageants of wrecked talent showing up like queens of stage and screen, who adorn your table by letting you sit at it with them below the salt like a foodbankas they told you lies about the famous fireflies they used to cavort with like radical root fires.

Memories of the last literary scene I ever wanted to be in, eyeless images of overcast dreams, the business of art spinning the lack of imagination into some tear drop of a bauble for public consumption that made evaporation look deep by comparison.Treacherous metaphors. Nasty similes that thought they were teaching you a moral lesson through petty betrayals of the trust you placed in them against your better judgement, only to ignore with Olympian indifference the kind of dung heap wisdom that tried to disenchant you from ever trusting your likeness in another again like the alienable bonds of mutual opportunism.

Old men now, many dead at the hands of their vices, nine dog paddlers for every synchronized swimmer, prima ballerinas that could really write and paint, sing and dance once, crucible steel hammering out the slag of their impurities like sparks that shone for a moment like starclusters that hung in the air and then disappeared into the great reservoir of one-eyed mirrors.I can remember when that bag lady was a rose. I can recall when his charm partially concealed and compensated for what is so obviously feeble about him nowas he waxes mellifluously nostalgic, trying to squeeze a drop of honey out of his stinger like the good old days when he used to hang himself from the green boughs and dead branches of poetry like a pinata of killer bees coming on like a kite or Black Hawk sneakers tangled like bolas and medicine bags in personably contemporary powerlinesyou can still hear humming and hissing like a red shifting snakepit gone long in the toothwhenever it rains on the ashes of a smouldering guitartrying to serenade the moon under her Medusan window.